Depolarizing Phantasmagoria

What a bright young scholar I am, using words like phantasmagoria!

The word phantasmagoria means, according to the wise owls who manage the internet, “a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined.” I think it’s a pretty good characterization of social media, the constant shifting of images and figures and quotes that one rapidly flits through, not paying too much attention to any one thing, just getting the most general outline of the information they’re consuming. As Katja Grace says:

Sometimes I look at social media a bunch, but it would be hard for me to tell you what the actual content is, I suppose because whenever I’m looking at it, I’m focused on each object thing level in turn, not the big picture.

I’ve elsewhere said some not-very-nice things about social media, comparing it to cocaine and saying it’s why young people are so miserable (you can tell it’s not nice because if you said that to a person, they’d find it hurtful. For example, it would be ill-advised on a date to say “look, you seem very nice, but you’re like cocaine and the reason young people are so miserable). I think, however, that there is a positive effect from this phantasmagoria in terms of reduced political polarization.